While former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson has received the
lion's share of the mainstream media coverage provided to third-party
candidates in this highly volatile and unpredictable presidential campaign --
much of it making a complete fool of himself -- several other independent and
minor-party aspirants for the White House have struggled for even a small
fraction of the attention undeservedly heaped on the seemingly somnolent and
gaffe-prone Libertarian Party nominee.

One of those is Rocky De La Fuente, a doggedly determined
and largely self-funded candidate seeking to open the political process and
restore genuine democracy in the United States.

He's probably the best kept secret in this year's
presidential sweepstakes.

With little publicity or fanfare, the 61-year-old De La
Fuente has quietly scratched and clawed his way onto the ballot in no fewer
than twenty states this autumn -- and most likely would have been on the ballot
in at least half the states in the country were it not for a few minor
technicalities in states like Washington and New York, as well as antiquated and
arguably unconstitutional "sore loser" laws in Alabama, Arkansas and
Pennsylvania.

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Reminiscent of the late Eugene McCarthy's little-noticed
independent bid for the White House in the year of America's Bicentennial --
"The Bloodless Revolution of 1976," as McCarthy's young lawyers John C. Armor
and Philip L. Marcus described it -- De La Fuente is running to open the
political process in this country and to create greater awareness of how the
political system has been deliberately rigged to protect the two-party
stranglehold on American politics while severely limiting voter choice.

Like "Clean Gene" some forty years ago, De La Fuente hopes
to knock down a myriad of barriers deliberately put in place to thwart
candidates running outside the duopoly.
In 1976, McCarthy's legal team struck down unfair and unconstitutional
ballot access laws in at least sixteen states.
Like the former Minnesota senator, De La Fuente has already filed at
least eleven ballot access lawsuits pertaining to this year's general election,
including legal challenges to the burdensome and discriminatory number of
signatures required for an independent or minor-party candidate for president in
California, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Texas.

According to ballot access expert Richard Winger, the
longtime publisher of Ballot Access News,
De La Fuente's lawsuit in the Lone Star State also addresses the state's early
filing deadline and its sore loser law as applied to candidates who ran in the
Texas presidential primary.

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"The deck is stacked against anyone who is not a member of
the politically elite," says the amiable first-generation Mexican-American
candidate.

He's speaking from firsthand experience. Earlier this year, the savvy San Diego
businessman challenged Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in no fewer than
forty Democratic primaries and caucuses and in doing so became the first
candidate to ever qualify for the presidential primary ballot in Michigan and
possibly North Carolina via the petition method, an arduous task that required
obtaining a minimum of 12,000 valid signatures in the former state and more
than 10,000 valid signatures in North Carolina, a state with some of the
country's strictest ballot access requirements.
Remarkably, De La Fuente did the same thing in Massachusetts.

Though he met all three of those difficult hurdles -- he
submitted more than 20,000 petition signatures in Michigan, turned in 18,757
signatures in the Tar Heel State and obtained the necessary 2,500 valid
signatures in Massachusetts -- Clinton, Sanders and Maryland's Martin O'Malley,
the latter of whom dropped out of the Democratic contest faster than one could
say "Rocky De La Fuente," didn't need a single signature in those three states
because they were generally recognized as presidential candidates by the
national news media and had been given their party's official seal of approval.

Not surprisingly, De La Fuente was also shut out of the
televised Democratic presidential debates, a fact he squarely blames on the
Debbie Wasserman Schultz-led Democratic National Committee (DNC). "They want Hillary to be their next queen,"
he quipped while campaigning in Raleigh, North Carolina.

De La Fuente, incidentally, was the first person to call for
Wasserman-Schultz's resignation as head of the DNC, long before Vermont's
Bernie Sanders called for her ouster.

As a result of that painstakingly burdensome and expensive experience,
the unassuming and mild-mannered De La Fuente, a deep-pocketed political
"outsider," realized just how unfair the nation's entire electoral system
really is, how the entire process is intended to completely stymie a political
newcomer like himself.

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He learned the hard way, but he learned quickly, which is
precisely why he decided to remain in the race as a third-party candidate
through November.

Unlike Rocky, most candidates would have given up the ghost long
before now.

An avid chess player who thrives on simultaneously
outwitting his opponents on multiple chessboards, the soft-spoken De La Fuente
also waged a somewhat imaginative bid for Florida's Democratic U.S. Senate
nomination earlier this summer, sandwiching that last-minute candidacy in his
adopted state between his earlier bid for the Democratic presidential nomination
and his current third-party quest for the White House.

Darcy G. Richardson is the author of more than a dozen books on American politics and history. His most recent title, "Bernie: A Lifelong Crusade Against Wall Street & Wealth," was published by Sevierville Publishing in 2015. The recipient (more...)